CONCLAVE: Pope Fiction?

The Vatican is really made for the screen. Grand, echoing marble hallways, arcane rituals and elaborately-garbed characters. And power, lots of power.

Amid this sweeping grandeur, Edward Berger has taken Robert Harris's 2016 novel and surprisingly, turned it into an unusual but classic whodunnit.

The only death is that of an un-named pope, which opens the story, but the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Thomas Lawrence, finds himself turning detective when electoral rivalries threaten to hand control of the Catholic Church back to a reactionary patriarch.

Lawrence, played with a visibly heavy heart and weary body by Ralph Fiennes, is in charge of the conclave where the new pope is voted in. To add another level of crime fiction tropery, the cardinals are sequestered in the Vatican itself, making this a locked-room drama of sorts. 

The cardinals themselves are played by some of the best character actors working today: Stanley Tucci particularly stands out as the liberal Aldo Bellini, alternately idealistic and waspish. Lucian Msamati is Joshua Adeyemi, an earnest but very conservative Nigerian bishop. John Lithgow, always worth watching is Archbishop Tremblay, the first to fall under suspicion after he can't account for his meeting with the late pope, shortly before the pontiff's death.

There's plenty of scheming, backbiting and bitching, but as befitting the austere setting, the camp in this old-school detective story is dialled down to a believable level. The subtle and clandestine nature of the cardinals' sins mean that there is little action; a subplot involving terrorists in Rome itself is fairly superfluous. The story sometimes runs a little slackly and some of the atmospheric shots of lines of processing cardinals, that worked so well in the trailer, don't add quite as much as they ought. 

We do have a vicious chief villain in the guise of Archbishop Tedesco, the arch-traditionalist patriarch of Venice, played by Italian Sergio Castellitto having a whale of a time. Without traditional whodunnit campery, some amusing scenes are provided by the Vatican's hallowed halls containing various pieces of modern technology: Lawrence fumbles with a photocopier, Tremblay's coffee machine interrupts a conversation and Tedesco's ever-present vape is almost a character in its own right.

More mystery comes courtesy of Vincent Benitez, an unknown Mexican missionary recently made a cardinal in secret. The softly-spoken and kindly Benitez of course, has secrets of his own and is played with great sensitivity by Carlos Diehz. Remarkably, this is fiftysomething Diehz's first feature film.

In turn, the film's best comic moment comes courtesy of Isabella Rossellini's Sister Agnes, the head nun of the order who are looking after the cardinals. She becomes involved in the intrigue herself and delivers a bombshell with the most facetious curtsey ever performed on screen.

Conclave has proved unpopular with the Catholic press, who consider it blasphemous and disrespectful, but the cardinals, particularly Lawrence who is undergoing a small crisis of faith, are merely shown as being the fallible, flawed and deeply human men they are. That said, this isn't a deep treatise on theology or a major comment on modern Catholicism. It's a highly enjoyable detective story in an unusual and fascinating context.